V2 A Novel of World War II - Robert Harris Page 0,48
back in her seat. In the rear-view mirror Kay could see that the two women were holding hands. Well, well, she thought, and returned her attention to the road.
The Flanders countryside spread out exposed on either side, flat and bare, unprotected by the hedgerows she was used to in England. They passed isolated farms and barns, a big empty greenhouse with most of its windows broken, a line of leafless poplars like the teeth of a broken comb. There was little traffic, apart from the occasional old man on a wobbly bicycle. Nobody was working in the winter fields; there was no livestock. The vastness of the sky only served to depress the landscape further. Layers of monochrome clouds stacked up from the horizon. It began to spit with rain.
The first little town they came to seemed entirely shut. Outside a church, beside an elaborate 1918 war memorial of green oxidised copper, a group of children stood on the corner and held out their hands like beggars. The army vehicles swept past without slowing. The optimism of the autumn, when liberated civilians showered British tanks with flowers, looked to be long gone. Houses, shattered by bombs or shelling, stood roofless beneath the grey sky. The shop windows were empty. My God, thought Kay, with a stab of shock, this place is starving.
They drove eastwards for about an hour. Signs of war were everywhere – tanks on their transporters parked down a side road, the barrels of an anti-aircraft battery poking out of a palisade of sandbags, a stone bridge chipped by bullets and guarded by troops. Buildings seemed to have been burned out at random. One field was a moonscape of perfectly circular waterlogged holes. She wondered if it were true that there might still be some Germans in the area. It seemed unlikely. The battlefront must have swept on weeks ago. Perhaps it was just a story the driver had invented to unsettle them.
Around noon, she spotted a sign for Mechelen, and soon afterwards the convoy entered the outskirts of a town, thundering down a narrow cobbled street of small houses. The black, yellow and red stripes of the Belgian flag hung from a couple of the upstairs windows. Up ahead, rising over the roofs, were the twin spires of what appeared to be a large church.
The lorry with its trailing column of jeeps emerged from the street and drove onto a low bridge spanning a wide canal. In the distance, on what looked like waste ground leading down to the water’s edge, two big, boxy olive-green vans with radar dishes and radio antennae on their roofs were parked behind barbed wire. The dishes were directed away from them, pointing northwards – towards The Hague, Kay guessed. She turned to the back seat to share her excitement, but Joan and Louie had already seen them.
Louie said, with an air of expertise, ‘GL Mark Threes. The latest MRUs.’
At the end of the bridge a yellow road sign pointed left to Antwerpen and Sint-Niklaas, right to Heist-op-den-Berg, Leuven, Brussel. What Kay had mistaken for a church turned out to be a massive fortified medieval gate, on top of which a pair of ugly twin spires of dark slate had been stuck, apparently as an afterthought. The convoy swung around it, passed along a broad, handsome street of big flat-fronted houses and shops, and drew to a halt.
From the back seat, Louie sounded surprised. ‘This is it?’
The driver nodded. ‘It is, ma’am. HQ, 33 Wing.’
Kay had presumed the headquarters would be in some big country pile like Danesfield. Instead, they were confronted by a nineteenth-century provincial terraced house with an iron balcony – grand but nondescript. She swung herself out of the jeep and pulled the passenger seat forward to let the other two out. She noticed the lorry had disappeared.
‘What happened to the sergeants?’
‘They’ve gone straight to the barracks,’ said the driver. ‘HQ is officers only.’
Joan pointed to a sign in thick Germanic script above the doorway: Soldatenheim. She gave a nervous laugh. ‘You’d have thought they might’ve got round to taking that down!’
The WAAFs began to congregate on the pavement with their suitcases. It was raining harder now. An old-fashioned cream-coloured tram rattled past, half empty; a few curious faces turned to stare at them. Wing Commander Knowsley put his hands on his hips and gazed up at the three-storey building. His little moustache twitched slightly – like a mouse’s whiskers, Kay thought. He looked pensive, just as he had